5 Quick Design Tips to Get More Website Traffic

Creating content for web users is always a challenge, but making them engaged with it is even more challenging. People create websites to share information, so your major goal is to make the process of finding the necessary data as easy as it’s possible.

Ensuring your visitors are happy with site design is just the first step. Competitive world dictates its own rules, so you need to find some ways to make visitors engaged with your content, stay longer and keep coming back. In this article I’m going to share with you five simple tips on how to get more website traffic and increase engagement on your site.

Work On Readability

Readability is the key feature when it comes to generating bigger amount of conversion and engagement. If your site has tiny, hardly readable fonts there is a big chance visitors would leave it at once. That literally means you would lose potential customers.

Ensure all the texts on your site are clearly readable: needed amount of whitespace, displaying lists with bullet points, clear background to highlight the texts. Moreover, you can put all the advertising elements, banners, and sliders in a way so they don’t distract a user from your content.

Create a Parallax Story

Parallax scrolling is a web design trend and for a good reason. It provides eye-catchy way to visualize the message you deliver. In other words, it will help you to tell a story about your products and services.

Parallax uses several design elements that move individually as you scroll a web page. This results in fantastic dynamic experience that encourages users to scroll more.

Make Sure Your Site Loads Fast

Nothing kills engagement like slow time of loading on your site. If your site takes too long to load, visitors will leave the site for sure – no one has the patience to wait for it.

According to September, 15 2014, data gathered by HTTP Archive, the average web page size is 1.89MB, and about 63.3% of which are images.

So, the number of images on the page influences the speed of loading. In order to enhance your engagement and usability, you should optimize your images and make them load as fast as it’s possible.

To solve the problem of huge image sizes, you may use Photoshop. Just save your pictures using Photoshop’s Save for Web & Devices function that is convenient for both photographs taken with high-resolution cameras and web-optimized images. Use 80%“ JPEG – High” preset setting, – it does not make quality lower dramatically, but reduces the size.

Moreover, there are a lot of online tools to reduce the size of your images without losing quality. For instance, Smush.it from Yahoo. It lets you upload an unlimited number of images there, smush them and download for free.

Use Icons Wisely

Usually, you need a lot of text to describe everything on information rich sites. It’s a challenging task for designers to present wording with maximum impact. The usage of icons could help your users to find what they’re looking for easier.

Icons are like visual sign points help guide the eye from place to place. These days designers use icon fonts to make glyphs that behave just like text: they’re infinitely scalable, vector-based, and customizable via CSS.

In the early days, icons had to be implemented as bitmap graphics, which was cumbersome to implement and modify, and there was no simple way to style the icons. In combination with dynamic typography icons will make your site easy to read and navigate which contributes engagement.

Make It Responsive

More and more people tend to look through internet with mobile devices. Just check out your website audience to see that over 40% of your traffic are mobile device users. So, make sure your site displays correctly on any screen.

Responsive design is not all about layout only, but about content too. It’s great if your layout adapts to any screen resolution, but your content should do the same. Mobile users don’t have time to read long paragraphs of text written with tiny letters. Your mobile version should concise clear call to actions. Reading on a small screen is not fun, so make sure all the text on your site has comfortable size, but don’t make users to zoom in.

Having site content that responds to user’s reading situation makes the website itself more engaging. The same idea extends to images too.

Conclusion

The things I described above have always taken place in web design and you should consider them while creating your next web project. Make sure your site is dynamic, quick, and user-friendly to make your visitors engage with your content and even increase your sales.

Nancy Young is a passionate writer and blogger. She writes tons of inspirational articles on photography, despite the fact that she is an economist by education. You can make friends with Nancy on Twitter.